Campaign Scheduling: Local Storage

When you have your campaign set up, you'll need to set the visitor targeting and the scheduling. Campaign Scheduling consists out of multiple settings that can help you with the prompting of the campaign when the visitor targeting criteria have been met. Scheduling settings include timing, frequency, and a campaign reset. In this article, we take a deeper look into Campaign Scheduling and more specifically the use of Local Storage for campaign scheduling.

Local Storage

When you've done the settings of your campaign form and the visitor targeting, you'll be asked to set the scheduling of your campaign. One of the settings you can set in the scheduling is the "Do not bother visitors more than once". If you enable this feature you make sure that visitors don't see the campaign more than once, regardless of their interaction with the form using Local Storage, until the campaign is reset. The Local Storage is also used for tracking if a customer has already filled out campaign or opted-out.

The process

To give you a better understanding of how the Local Storage is used and how Usabilla determines if a campaign should be prompted to the visitor. The diagram illustrates the process where the prompting of a campaign to the visitor, who matches the visitor targeting criteria, needs to be decided.

As you can see in the diagram we use a Local Storage object to determine if a campaign should be prompted to the visitor. The “Do not bother visitors more than once” option makes sure that a Local Storage object is created even if the visitor does not interact with the prompted campaign.

Background info

Local Storage objects are, as the name implies, objects that are stored locally for using the web page. Local Storage objects are similar to cookies in the sense that they both store data. However, Cookies and Local Storage objects do serve different purposes. Cookies are primarily for reading server-side, local storage can only be read client-side. Furthermore, Local Storage objects store data with no expiration date, and gets cleared only through JavaScript, or clearing the Browser Cache / Locally Stored Data, whereas a cookie can expire.

So clearing your cache makes the campaign prompt again since Local Storage objects will be deleted if the cache is cleared. Resetting your campaign in the campaign settings will make sure the campaign checks for a different Local Storage object. Local Storage objects are not persistent across devices and do not track the visitor over multiple domains.